Prodidit areanas arcta fenestra faces.
His sonnets have been highly and deservedly commended by no less competent a judge than Mr. Coleridge. They are alone sufficient to prove (if any proof were wanting) that this form of composition is not unsuited to our language. One of our longest, as it is one of our most beautiful poems, the Faerie Queene, is written in a stanza which demands the continual recurrence of an equal number of rhymes; and the chief objection to our adopting the sonnet is the paucity of our rhymes.
The lines to Sir Joshua Reynolds are marked by the happy turn of the compliment, and by the strength and harmony of the versification, at least as far as the formal couplet measure will admit of those qualities. They need not fear a comparison with the verses addressed by Dryden to Kneller, or by Pope to Jervas.
His Latin compositions are nearly as excellent as his English. The few hendecasyllables he has left, have more of the vigour of Catullus than those by Flaminio; but Flaminio excels him in delicacy. The Mons Catharinae contains nearly the same images as Gray's Ode on a Prospect of Eton College. In the word "cedrinae," which occurs in the verses on Trinity College Chapel, he has, we believe, erroneously made the penultimate long. Dr. Mant has observed another mistake in his use of the word "Tempe" as a feminine noun, in the lines translated from Akenside. When in his sports with his brother's scholars at Winchester he made their exercises for them, he used to ask the boy how many faults he would have:—one such would have been sufficient for a lad near the head of the school.
His style in prose, though marked by a character of magnificence, is at times stiff and encumbered. He is too fond of alliteration in prose as well as in verse; and the cadence of his sentences is too evidently laboured.
FOOTNOTES[1] There is a little memoir of James St. Amand, in the preface, thatwill interest some readers. He was of Lincoln College, Oxford, about1705, where he had scarcely remained a year, before his ardour forGreek literature induced him to visit Italy, chiefly with a view ofsearching MSS. that might serve for an edition of Theocritus. InItaly, before he had reached his twentieth year, he was well knownto the learned world, and had engaged the esteem of many eminentmen; among others, of Vincenzo Gravina, Niccolo Valletto, Fontanini,Quirino, Anton Maria Salvini, and Henry Newton, the EnglishAmbassador to the Duke of Tuscany. Their letters to him arepreserved in the Bodleian. By his researches into the MSS. ofItalian libraries, he assisted his learned friends, Kuster, LeClerc, Potter, Hudson, and Kennet, and other literary characters ofthat time, in their several pursuits. He then returned to England byway of Geneva and Paris, well laden with treasures derived from theforeign libraries, all which, with a large collection of valuablebooks, he bequeathed to the Bodleian. He died about 1750. Hedesisted from his intention of publishing Theocritus, either fromill health, or weariness of his work, or some fear about itssuccess. His preparations for this edition, together with some noteson Pindar (an edition of which he also meditated), Aristophanes, theArgonautics of Apollonius Rhodius, Demosthenes, and others, remainin the Bodleian.Dr. Shaw, in his edition of Apollonius Rhodius, has since made useof his notes on that poet, and pays a tribute to his criticalabilities in the preface.[2] Warton's distinction between them is well imagined."Sinillis est Theocritus amplo cuidam pascuo per se satis foecundo,herbis pluribus frugiferis floribusque pulchris abundanti, dulcibusetiam fluviis uvido: similis Virgilius horto distincto nitentibusareolis; ubi larga floruni copia, sed qui studiose dispositi,curaque meliore nutriti, atque exculti diligenter, olim hue a pascuoillo majore transferebantur."
* * * * *
The Memoirs of Joseph Warton, by Dr. Wooll, the present Head-master of Rugby school, is a book which, although it contains a faithful representation of his life and character by one who had been his pupil, and though it is enriched with a collection of letters between some of the men most distinguished in literature during his time, is yet so much less known than it deserves, that in speaking of it to Mr. Hayley, who had been intimate with Warton, and to whom some of the letters are addressed, I found him ignorant of its contents. It will supply me with much of what I have to relate concerning the subject of it.
There is no instance in this country of two brothers having been equally celebrated for their skill in poetry with Joseph and Thomas Warton. What has been already told of the parentage of the one renders it unnecessary to say more in this respect of the other. He was born at Dunsfold, in Surrey, under the roof of his maternal grandfather, in the beginning of 1722. Like his brother, he experienced the care of an affectionate parent, who did the utmost his scanty means would allow to educate them both as scholars; but with this difference, that Joseph being three-and -twenty years old at the time of Mr. Warton's decease, whereas Thomas was but seventeen, was more capable of appreciating, as it deserved, the tenderness of such a father. To what has been before said of this estimable man, I have to add, that his poems, of which I had once a cursory view, appeared to me to merit more notice than they have obtained; and that his version of Fracastorio's pathetic lamentation on the death of his two sons particularly engaged my attention. Suavis adeo poeta ac doctus, is the testimony borne to him by one[1] who will himself have higher claims of the same kind on posterity.
Having been some time at New College school, but principally taught by his father till he was fourteen years old, Joseph was then admitted on the foundation of Winchester, under Dr. Sandby. Here, together with two of his school-fellows, of whom Collins was one, he became a contributor to the Gentleman's Magazine. Johnson, who then assisted in editing that miscellany, had sagacity enough to distinguish, from the rest, a few lines that were sent by Collins, which, though not remarkable for excellence, ought now to take their place among his other poems.
In 1740, Warton being superannuated at Winchester, was entered of Oriel College, Oxford; and taking his bachelor's degree, in 1744, was ordained to his father's curacy at Basingstoke. Having lost his father about a year after, he removed to the curacy of Chelsea, in February, 1746. Near this time, I suppose a letter, that is without date of time or place, to have been written to his brother. As it informs us of some particulars relating to Collins, of whom it is to be wished that more were known, I am tempted to transcribe it.
Dear Tom,—You will wonder to see my name in an advertisement next week, so I thought I would apprize you of it. The case was this. Collins met me in Surrey, at Guildford races, when I wrote out for him my Odes, and he likewise communicated some of his to me: and being both in very high spirits, we took courage, resolved to join our forces, and to publish them immediately. I flatter myself, that I shall lose no honour by this publication, because I believe these Odes, as they now stand, are infinitely the best things I ever wrote. You will see a very pretty one of Collins's, on the Death of Colonel Ross before Tournay. It is addressed to a lady who was Ross's intimate acquaintance, and who, by the way, is Miss Bett Goddard. Collins is not to publish the Odes unless he gets ten guineas for them.
I returned from Milford last night, where I left Collins with my mother and sister, and he sets out to-day for London. I must now tell you, that I have sent him your imitation of Horace's Blandusian Fountain, to be printed amongst ours, and which you shall own or not as you think proper. I would not have done this without your consent, but because I think it very poetically and correctly done, and will get you honour.
* * * * *
You will let me know what the Oxford critics say. Adieu, dear Tom.
I am your most affectionate brother,
On this Dr. Wooll founds a conjecture, that Warton published a volume of poems conjointly with his brother and Collins; but adds, that after a diligent search he had not been able to discover it. I think it more likely that the design was abandoned. However this may be, it is certain that he himself published a volume of Odes in 1746, of which, as I learn from a note to the present Bishop of Killaloe's verses to his memory, a second edition appeared in the following year. To complete his recovery from the small-pox, which he had taken at Chelsea, he went, in May 1746, to Chobham; and then, after officiating for a few months at Chawton and Droxford, returned to his first curacy of Basingstoke. In the next year he was presented by the Duke of Bolton to the rectory of Wynslade, by which preferment he was enabled immediately to marry a young lady in that neighbourhood, of the name of Daman, to whom he had been long attached. Of the country adjacent to Wynslade, Thomas Warton has given a very pleasing description in one of his sonnets, and in an "Ode sent to a friend, on his leaving a favourite village in Hampshire." Both were written on the occasion of his brother's absence, who had gone in the train of the Duke of Bolton to France. One motive, on which he went, would not now be thought quite creditable to a clergyman. It was that he might be at hand to join the Duke in marriage to his mistress, as soon as the Duchess, who was far gone in a dropsy, should be no more. Warton set out reluctantly, but with the hope that he might benefit his family by compliance. He had not been away five months, when the impatience for home came on him so strongly, that he quitted Montauban, where the Duke was residing, and made his way towards England by such conveyances as he could meet with; at one time in a courier's cart; at another, in the company of carriers who were travelling in Britanny. Thus he scrambled on to Bourdeaux, and till he reached St. Malo's, where he took ship and landed at Southampton. When he had been returned a month the Duchess died. He then asked permission to go back, and perform the marriage ceremony; but the chaplain of the embassy at Turin was already on his way for that purpose.
He was now once more at Wynslade, restored to a domestic life, and the uninterrupted pursuit of his studies. Before going abroad, he had published (in 1749) his Ode on West's translation of Pindar; and after his return, employed himself in writing papers, chiefly on subjects of criticism, for the Adventurer, and in preparing for the press an edition of Virgil, which (in 1753) he published, together with Pitt's translation of the Aeneid, his own of the Eclogues and Georgies, his notes on the whole, and several essays. The book has been found useful for schools; and was thought at the time to do him so much credit, that it obtained for him the degree of Master of Arts by diploma from the University of Oxford, and no doubt was instrumental in recommending him to the place of second master of Winchester School, to which he was appointed in 1755. In the meantime he had been presented by the Jervoise family to the rectory of Tunworth, and resided for a short time at that place.
In 1756, appeared the first volume of his Essay on the genius and writings of Pope, dedicated to Young. The name of the author was to have been concealed, but he does not seem to have kept his own secret very carefully, for it was immediately spoken of as his by Akenside, Johnson, and Dr. Birch. The second volume did not follow till after an interval of twenty-six years. The information contained in this essay, which is better known than his other writings, is such as the recollection of a scholar, conversant in polite literature, might easily have supplied. He does not, like his brother, ransack the stores of antiquity for what has been forgotten, but deserves to be recalled; nor, like Hurd, exercise, on common materials, a refinement that gives the air of novelty to that with which we have been long familiar. He relaxes, as Johnson said of him, the brow of criticism into a smile. Though no longer in his desk and gown, he is still the benevolent and condescending instructor of youth; a writer, more capable of amusing and tempting onwards, by some pleasant anticipations, one who is a novice in letters, than of satisfying the demands of those already initiated. He deserves some praise for having been one of the first who attempted to moderate the extravagant admiration for Pope, whom he considered as the poet of reason rather than of fancy; and to disengage us from the trammels of the French school. Some of those who followed have ventured much further, with success; but it was something to have broken the ice. I do not know that he published anything else while he remained at Winchester, except[2] an edition of Sir Philip Sydney's Defence of Poesy, and Observations on Eloquence and Poetry from the Discoveries of Ben Jonson, in 1787. His literary exertions, and the attention he paid to the duties of his school, did not go unrewarded. In 1766 he was advanced to the Head-mastership of Winchester, and took his two degrees in divinity; in 1782, Bishop Lowth gave him a prebend of St. Paul's, and the rectory of Chorley, which he was allowed to exchange for Wickham, in Hants. In 1788, through the intervention of Lord Shannon with Mr. Pitt, he obtained a prebend of Winchester; and soon after, at the solicitation of Lord Malmesbury, was presented by the Bishop of that diocese to the rectory of Easton, which, in the course of a twelve-month, he exchanged for Upham.
In his domestic relations, he enjoyed as much happiness as prudence and affection could ensure him, but not unembittered by those disastrous accidents to which every father of a family is exposed. Some years after his marriage (1763) his letters to his brother discover him struggling under his anguish for the loss of a favourite daughter, who had died under inoculation, but striving to conceal his feelings for the sake of a wife whom he tenderly loved. In 1772, this wife was also taken from him, leaving him with six children. His second son, Thomas, fellow of New College, a man on whom the poetic spirit of the Wartons had descended, was found by him, one day when he returned from the college prayers, sitting in the chair in which he had left him after dinner, without life. It was the termination of a disease under which he had long laboured. This happened in 1786; and before he had space to recover the blow, in four years after, his brother died. In 1773, he had solaced himself by a second marriage with Miss Nicholas, the daughter of Robert Nicholas, Esq. In both his matrimonial connexions, his sister described him as having been eminently fortunate.
The latter part of his life was spent in retirement and tranquillity. In 1793, he resigned the mastership of Winchester, and settled himself on his living of Wickham. He had intended to finish his brother's History of English Poetry, which wanted another volume to complete it; and might now have found time enough to accomplish the task. But an obstacle presented itself, by which it is likely that he was discouraged from proceeding. The description given by Daniel Prince, a respectable old bookseller at Oxford, of the state in which his brother's rooms were found at his decease, and of the fate that befell his manuscripts and his property, may be edifying to some future fellow of a college, who shall employ himself in similar pursuits.[3] "Poor Thomas Warton's papers were in a sad litter, and his brother Joe has made matters worse by confusedly cramming all together, sending them to Winchester, &c. Mr. Warton could not give so much as his old clothes; his very shoes, stockings, and wigs, laid about in abundance. Where could his money go? It must lay in paper among his papers, or be laid in a book; he could not, nor did not spend it; and his brother, on that score, is greatly disappointed."
A republication of Pope's works, with notes, offered him an easier occupation than the digesting of those scattered materials for the History of Poetry which he had thus assisted in disarranging. He was probably glad to escape from inaction, and set himself to parcel out his Essay into comments for this edition; which, in 1797, was published in nine volumes. His indiscretion, in adding to it some of Pope's productions which had been before excluded, has been most bitterly censured. That it would have been better to let them remain where they were can scarcely be questioned. But I should be more willing to regard the insertion of them as proof of his own simplicity, in suspecting no harm from what he had himself found to be harmless, than of any design to communicate injury to others. A long life, passed without blame, and in the faithful discharge of arduous duties, ought to have secured him from this misconstruction at its close. After all, the pieces objected to are such as are more offensive to good manners than dangerous to morality. There are some other of Pope's writings, more likely to inflame the passions, which yet no one scruples to read; and Dr. Wooll has suggested that it was inconsistent to set up the writer as a teacher of virtue, and in the same breath to condemn his editor as a pander to vice.
He bestowed on his censurers no more consideration than they deserved, and went on to prepare an edition of Dry den for the press. Two volumes, with his notes, were completed, when his labours were finally broken off by a painful disease. His malady was an affection of the kidneys, which continued to harass him for some months, and ended in a fatal paralysis on the twenty-third of February, 1800, in the seventy-eighth year of his age.
He was interred in the cathedral at Winchester, where, by the contributions of his former scholars, a monument, executed by Mr. Flaxman, was raised to his memory, of a design so elegant, as the tomb of a poet has not often been honoured with. It is inscribed with the following epitaph—
H.S.E.Josephus Warton, S.T.P.Hujus EcclesiaePrebendarius:Scolae WintoniensisPer annos fere trigintaInformator:Poeta fervidus, facilis, expolitus.Criticus eruditus, perspicax, elegans:Obiit XXIII'o. Feb. M.D.CCC.Aetat. LXXVIII.Hoc qualecunquePietatis monumentumPraeceptori optimo,Desideratissimo,Wiccamici suiP.C.
In the frankness of his disposition he appears to have resembled his brother, but with more liveliness and more love of general society. I have heard, that in the carelessness of colloquial freedom, he was apt to commit himself by hasty and undigested observations. As he did not aim at being very oracular himself, so he was unusually tolerant of ignorance in others. Of this, a diverting instance is recorded by Dr. Wooll: meeting in company with a lady who was a kinswoman of Pope's, he eagerly availed himself of the occasion offered for learning some new particulars concerning one by whom so much of his time and thoughts had been engaged. "Pray, Sir," began the lady, "did not you write a book about my cousin Pope?" "Yes, Madam;" was the reply. "They tell me 'twas vastly clever. He wrote a great many plays, did not he?" was the next question. "I never heard but of one attempt, Madam;" said Warton, beginning perhaps to expect some discovery, when his hopes were suddenly crushed by an "Oh! no," from the lady, "I beg your pardon, Sir. That was Mr. Shakspeare. I always confound them." He had the good breeding to conceal his disappointment, and to take a courteous leave of the kinswoman of Pope.
He was regarded with great affection by those whom he had educated. The opinions of a man so long experienced in the characters of children, and in the best methods of instruction, are on these subjects entitled to much notice. "He knew," says his biographer and pupil, "that the human mind developed itself progressively, but not always in the same consistent degrees, or at periods uniformly similar." He conjectured, therefore, that the most probable method of ensuring some valuable improvement to the generality of boys was not to exact what the generality are incapable of performing. As a remedy for inaccurate construction, arising either from apparent idleness or inability, he highly approved, and sedulously imposed, translation. Modesty, timidity, or many other constitutional impediments, may prevent a boy from displaying before his master, and in the front of his class, those talents of which privacy, and a relief from these embarrassments, will often give proof. These sentiments were confirmed by that most infallible test, experience; as he declared (within a few years of his death) that "the best scholars he had sent into the world were those whom, whilst second master, he had thus habituated to translation, and given a capacity of comparing and associating the idiom of the dead languages with their own."
It is pleasant to observe the impression which men, who have engrossed to themselves the attention of posterity, have made on one another, when chance has brought them together. Of Mason, whom he fell in with at York, he tells his brother, that "he is the most easy, best natured, agreeable man he ever met with." In the next year, he met with Goldsmith, and observed of him, "that of all solemn coxcombs, he was the first, yet sensible; and that he affected to use Johnson's hard words in conversation."
Soon after the first volume of his Essay on Pope had been published, Lyttleton, then newly raised to the peerage, gave him his scarf, and submitted some of his writings, before they were printed, to his inspection.
Harris, the author of Hermes, and Lowth, were others in whose friendship he might justly have prided himself.
He was one of the few that did not shrink from a collision with Johnson; who could so ill endure a shock of this kind, that on one occasion he cried out impatiently, "Sir, I am not used to contradiction."
"It would be better for yourself and your friends, Sir, if you were;" was the natural retort. Their common friends interfered, to prevent a ruder altercation.
Like Johnson, he delighted in London, where he regularly indulged himself by passing the holidays at Christmas. His fondness for everything relating to a military life was a propensity that he shared with his brother; and while the one might have been seen following a drum and fife at Oxford, the other, by the sprightliness of his conversation, had drawn a circle of red coats about him at the St. James's Coffee House, where he frequently breakfasted. Both of them were members of the Literary Club, set on foot by Sir Joshua Reynolds.
This gaiety of temper did not hinder him from discharging his clerical office in a becoming manner. "His style of preaching," we are told by Mr. Wooll, "was unaffectedly earnest and impressive; and the dignified solemnity with which he read the Liturgy, particularly the Communion Service, was remarkably awful."
His reputation as a critic and a scholar has preserved his poetry from neglect. Of his Odes, that to Fancy, written when he was very young, is one that least disappoints us by a want of poetic feeling. Yet if we compare it with that by Collins, on the Poetical Character, we shall see of how much higher beauty the same subject was capable. In the Ode to Evening, he has again tried his strength with Collins. There are some images of rural life in it that have the appearance of being drawn from nature, and which therefore please.
Hail, meek-eyed maiden, clad in sober grey,Whose soft approach the weary woodman loves,As homeward bent to kiss his prattling babes,He jocund whistles through the twilight groves.* * * * ** * * * *To the deep wood the clamorous rooks repair,Light skims the swallow o'er the watery scene,And from the sheep-cotes, and fresh-furrow'd field,Stout ploughmen meet to wrestle on the green.
The swain that artless sings on yonder rock,His nibbling sheep and lengthening shadow spies;Pleased with the cool, the calm, refreshful hour,And the hoarse hummings of unnumber'd flies.
But these pretty stanzas are interrupted by the mention of Phoebus, the Dryads, old Sylvan, and Pan. The Ode to Content is in the same metre as his school-fellow's Ode to Evening; but in the numbers, it is very inferior both to that and to Mrs. Barbauld's Ode to Spring.
In his Dying Indian, he has produced a few lines of extraordinary force and pathos. The rest of his poems, in blank verse, are for the most part of an indifferent structure.
In his Translations from Virgil, he will probably be found to excel Dryden as much in correctness, as he falls short of him in animation and harmony.
When his Odes were first published, Gray perceived the author to be devoid of invention, but praised him for a very poetical choice of expression, and for a good ear, and even thus perhaps a little over-rated his powers. But our lyric poetry was not then what it has since been made by Gray himself, the younger Warton, Mason, Russell, and one or two writers now living.
If he had enjoyed more leisure, it is probable that he might have written better; for he was solicitous not to lose any distinction to be acquired by his poetry; and took care to reclaim a copy of humorous verses, entitled, an Epistle from Thomas Hearne, which had been attributed by mistake to his brother, among whose poems it is still printed.
FOOTNOTES [1] Mr. Crowe, in one of his Crewian Orations. [2] Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, vol. ix. [3] Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, vol. ix.
* * * * *
An account of Christopher Anstey, written by his second son, is prefixed to the handsome edition of his works, printed at London, in 1808. He was born on the thirty-first of October, 1724, and was the son of Doctor Anstey, rector of Brinkley, in Cambridgeshire, a living in the gift of St. John's College, Cambridge; of which the Doctor had formerly been fellow and tutor. His mother was Mary, daughter of Anthony Thompson, Esq. of Trumpington, in the same county. They had no offspring but our poet, and a daughter born some years before him.
His father was afflicted with a total deafness for so considerable a portion of his life, as never to have heard the sound of his son's voice; and was thus rendered incapable of communicating to him that instruction which he might otherwise have derived from a parent endowed with remarkable acuteness of understanding. He was, therefore, sent very early to school at Bury St. Edmunds. Here he continued, under the tuition of the Rev. Arthur Kinsman, till he was removed to Eton; on the foundation of which school he was afterwards placed.
His studies having been completed with great credit to himself, under Doctor George, the head-master of Eton, in the year 1742 he succeeded to a scholarship of King's College, Cambridge, where his classical attainments were not neglected. He was admitted in 1745 to a fellowship of his college; and, in the next year, he took his degree of Bachelor of Arts. He now resided chiefly in the University, where his resistance to an innovation, attempted to be introduced into King's College, involved him in a dispute which occasioned the degree of Master to be refused him. That College had immemorially asserted for its members an exemption from the performance of those public exercises demanded of the rest of the University as a qualification for their degrees. This right was now questioned; and it was required of the Bachelor Fellows of King's, that they should compose and pronounce a Latin oration in the public schools. Such an infringement of privilege was not to be tamely endured. After some opposition made by Anstey, in common with the other junior Fellows, the exercise in dispute was at lenth exacted. But Anstey, who was the senior Bachelor of the year, and to whose lot it therefore fell first to deliver this obnoxious declamation, contrived to frame it in such a manner, as to cast a ridicule on the whole proceeding. He was accordingly interrupted in the recitation of it, and ordered to compose another; in which, at the same time that he pretended to exculpate himself from his former offence, he continued in the same vein of raillery. Though his degree was withheld in consequence of this pertinacity, yet it produced the desired effect of maintaining for the College its former freedom.
While an under-graduate, he had distinguished himself by his Latin verses, called the Tripos Verses; and, in 1748, by a poem, in the same language, on the Peace; printed in the Cambridge Collection.
His quarrel with the senior part of the University did not deprive him of his fellowship. He was still occasionally an inmate of the College, and did not cease to be a Fellow, till he came into the possession of the family estate at his mother's death, in 1754.
In two years after he married Anne, third daughter of Felix Calvert, Esq. of Albury-Hall, in Hertfordshire, and the sister of John Calvert, Esq. one of his most intimate friends, who was returned to that and many successive Parliaments, for the borough of Hertford. "By this most excellent lady," says his biographer, with the amiable warmth of filial tenderness, "who was allowed to possess every endowment of person, and qualification of mind and disposition which could render her interesting and attractive in domestic life, and whom he justly regarded as the pattern of every virtue, and the source of all his happiness, he lived in uninterrupted and undiminished esteem and affection for nearly half a century; and by her (who for the happiness of her family is still living) he had thirteen children, of whom eight only survive him."
This long period is little checquered with events. Having no taste for public business, and his circumstances being easy and independent, he passed the first fourteen years at his seat in Cambridgeshire, in an alternation of study and the recreations of rural life, in which he took much pleasure. But, at the end of that time, the loss of his sister gave a shock to his spirits, which they did not speedily recover. That she was a lady of superior talents is probable, from her having been admitted to a friendship and correspondence with Mrs. Montague, then Miss Robinson. The effect which this deprivation produced on him was such as to hasten the approach, and perhaps to aggravate the violence, of a bilious fever, for the cure of which by Doctor Heberden's advice, he visited Bath, and by the use of those waters was gradually restored to health.
In 1766 he published his Bath Guide, from the press of Cambridge; a poem, which aiming at the popular follies of the day, and being written in a very lively and uncommon style, rapidly made its way to the favour of the public. At its first appearance, Gray, who was not easily pleased, in a letter to one of his friends observed, that it was the only thing in fashion, and that it was a new and original kind of humour. Soon after the publication of the second edition, he sold the copy-right for two hundred pounds to Dodsley, and gave the profits previously accruing from the work to the General Hospital at Bath. Dodsley, about ten years after his purchase, candidly owned that the sale had been more productive to him than that of any other book in which he had before been concerned; and with much liberality restored the copy-right to the author.
In 1767 he wrote a short Elegy on the Death of the Marquis of Tavistock; and the Patriot, a Pindaric Epistle, intended to bring into discredit the practice of prize-fighting.
Not long after he was called to serve the office of high-sheriff for the county of Cambridge. In 1770 he quitted his seat there for a house which he purchased in Bath. The greater convenience of obtaining instruction for a numerous family, the education of which had hitherto been superintended by himself, was one of the motives that induced him to this change of habitation.
The Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers appearing soon after his arrival at Bath, and being by many imputed to a writer who had lately so much distinguished himself by his talent for satire, he was at considerable pains to disavow that publication; and by some lines containing a deserved compliment to his sovereign, gave a sufficient pledge for the honesty of his disclaimer.
In 1776, a poem entitled An Election Ball, founded on a theme proposed by Lady Miller, who held a sort of little poetical court at her villa at Batheaston, did not disappoint the expectations formed of the author of the Bath Guide. It was at first written in the Somersetshire dialect, but was afterwards judiciously stripped of its provincialism.
About 1786 he entertained a design of collecting his poems, and publishing them together. But the painful recollections which this task awakened, of those friends and companions of his youth who had been separated from him by death during so long a period, made him relinquish his intention. He committed, however, to the press, translations of some of Gay's Fables, which had been made into Latin, chiefly with a view to the improvement of his children; an Alcaic Ode to Doctor Jenner, on the discovery of the Cowpock; and several short poems in his own language. "His increasing years," to use the words of his son, "stole inperceptibly on the even tenor of his life, and gradually lessened the distance of his journey through it, without obscuring the serenity of the prospect. Unimpeded by sickness, and unclouded by sorrow, or any serious misfortune, his life was a life of temperance, of self-denial, and of moderation, in all things; and of great regularity. He rose early in the morning,ante diem poscens chartas, and was constant on horseback at his usual hour, and in all seasons. His summers were uniformly passed at Cheltenham, with his family, during the latter part of his life; and upon his return to Bath in the autumn, he fell habitually into the same unruffled scenes of domestic ease and tranquillity, rendered every day more joyous and interesting to him by the increase of his family circle, and the enlargement of his hospitable table; and by many circumstances and occurrences connected with the welfare of his children, which gave him infinite delight and satisfaction."
At the beginning of 1805, he experienced a sudden and general failure of his bodily faculties, and a correspondent depressure of mind. The little confidence he placed in the power of medicine made him reluctantly comply with the wishes of his friends, that he should take the opinion of Doctor Haygarth. Yet he was not without hope of alleviation to his complaints from change of air; and, therefore, removed from Bath to the house of his son-in-law, Mr. Bosanquet, in Wiltshire. Here having at first revived a little, he soon relapsed, and declining gradually, expired in the eighty-first year of his age, without apparent suffering, in the possession of his intellectual powers, and, according to the tender wish of Pindar for one of his patrons—
[Greek: huion, psaumi, paristamenon,]
in the midst of his children.
He was buried in the parish church of Walcot, in the city of Bath, in the same vault with his fourth daughter the wife of Rear-Admiral Sotheby, and her two infant children.
A cenotaph has been erected to his memory among the poets of his country in Westminster Abbey, by his eldest son, the Rev. Christopher Anstey, with the following inscription:—
M.S.Christopheri Anstey, Arm.Alumni Etonensis,Et Collegii Regalis apud Cantabrigienses olim Socii,Poetae,Literis elegantioribus adprime ornati,Et inter principes Poetarum,Qui in eodem genere floruerunt,Sedem eximiam tenentis.Ille annum circiterMDCCLXX.Rus suum in agro CantabrigiensiMutavit Bathonia,Quem locum ei praeter omne dudum arrisisseTestis est, celeberrimum illud Poema,Titulo inde ducto insignitum:Ibi deinceps sex et triginta annos commoratus,Obiit A.D. MDCCCV.Et aetatis suaeOctogesimo primo.
To this there is an encomium added, which its prolixity hinders me from inserting.
A painter and a poet were, perhaps, never more similar to each other in their talents than the contemporaries Bunbury and Anstey. There is in both an admirable power of seizing the ludicrous and the grotesque in their descriptions of persons and incidents in familiar life; and this accompanied by an elegance which might have seemed scarcely compatible with that power. There is in both an absence of any extraordinary elevation or vigour; which we do not regret, because we can hardly conceive but that they would be less pleasing if they were in any respect different from what they are. Each possesses a perfect facility and command over his own peculiar manner, which has secured him from having any successful imitator. Yet as they were both employed in representing the fortuitous and transient follies, which the face of society had put on in their own day, rather than in portraying the broader and more permanent distinctions of character and manners, it may be questioned whether they can be much relished out of their own country, and whether even there, the effect must not be weakened as fatuity and absurdity shall discover new methods of fastening ridicule upon themselves. They border more nearly on farce than comedy. They have neither of them any thing of fancy, that power which can give a new and higher interest to the laughable itself, by mingling it with the marvellous, and which has placed Aristophanes so far above all his followers.
When Anstey ventures out of his own walk, he does not succeed so well. It is strange that he should have attempted a paraphrase of St. Paul's eulogium on Charity, after the same task had been so ably executed by Prior. If there is anything, however, that will bear repetition, in a variety of forms, it is that passage of scripture; and his verses though not equal to Prior's, may still be read with pleasure.
The Farmer's Daughter is a plain and affecting tale.
His Latin verses might well have been spared. In the translation of Gray's Elegy there is a more than usual crampness; occasioned, perhaps, by his having rendered into hexameters the stanzas of four lines, to which the elegiac measure of the Romans would have been better suited. The Epistola Poetica Familiaris, addressed to his friend Mr. Bamfylde, has more freedom. His scholarship did him better service when it suggested to him passages in the poets of antiquity, which he has parodied with singular happiness. Such is that imitated in one of Simkin's Letters:
Do the gods such a noble ambition inspire?Or a god do we make of each ardent desire?
from Virgil's
Dine hunc ardorem mentibus addunt,Euryale? an sua cuique deus fit dira cupido?
a parody that is not the less diverting, from its having been before gravely made by Tasso:
O dio l'inspira,O l'uom del suo voler suo dio si face.
On the whole, he has the rare merit of having discovered a mode of entertaining his readers, which belongs exclusively to himself.
* * * * *
It is to be regretted that no one of Mason's friends has thought fit to pay the same tribute of respect to his memory, which he had himself paid to that of his two poetical friends, Gray and Whitehead. In this dearth of authentic biography, we must be contented with such information concerning him, as either his own writings, or the incidental mention made of him by others, will furnish.
William Mason was born on the 23rd of February, 1725, at Hull, where his father, who was vicar of St. Trinity, resided. Whether he had any other preceptor in boyhood, except his parent, is not known.
That this parent was a man of no common attainments, appears from a poem which his son addressed to him when he had attained his twenty-first year, and in which he acknowledged with gratitude the instructions he had received from him in the arts of painting, poetry, and music. In 1742, he was admitted of St. John's College, Cambridge; and there, in 1744, the year in which Pope died, he wrote Musaeus, a monody on that poet; and Il Bellicoso and Il Pacifico, a very juvenile imitation, as he properly calls it, of the Allegro and Penseroso. In 1745, he took his degree of Bachelor of Arts; and in the ensuing year, with a heavy heart, and with some fear lest he should grow old 'in northern clime,' bade farewell to Granta in an Ode, which commemorates the virtues of his tutor, Dr. Powell. He soon, however, returned; by his father's permission visited London; and removing from St. John's College to Pembroke Hall, was unexpectedly nominated Fellow of that society in 1747, when by the advice of Dr. Powell, he published Musaeus. His fourth Ode expresses his delight at the prospect of being restored to the banks of the Cam. In a letter to a friend written this year, he boasts that his poem had already passed through three impressions. At the same time, he wrote his Ode to a Water Nymph, not without some fancy and elegance, in which his passion for the new style of gardening first shewed itself; as his political bias did the year after in Isis, a poem levelled against the supposed Toryism of Oxford, and chiefly valuable for having called forth the Triumph of Isis, by Thomas Warton. To this he prefixed an advertisement, declaring that it would never have appeared in print, had not an interpolated copy, published in a country newspaper, scandalously misrepresented the principles of the author. Now commenced his intimacy with Gray, who was rather more than eight years his senior, a disparity which, at that period of life, is apt to prevent men at college from uniting very closely. His friend described him to Dr. Wharton as having much fancy, little judgment, and a good deal of modesty. "I take him," continued Gray, "for a good and well-meaning creature; but then he is really in simplicity a child, and loves every body he meets with: he reads little or nothing, writes abundance, and that with a design to make his fortune by it." On reviewing this character of himself twenty-five years after, he confessed, what cannot be matter of surprise, that this interval had made a considerable abatement in his general philanthropy; but denied having looked for more emolument from his publications than a few guineas to take him to a play or an opera. Gray's next report of him, after a year's farther acquaintance, is, that he grows apace into his good graces, as he knows him more; that "he is very ingenious, with great good nature and simplicity; a little vain, but in so harmless and so comical a way, that it does not offend one at all; a little ambitious, but withal so ignorant in the world and its ways, that this does not hurt him in one's opinion; so sincere and so undisguised, that no mind with a spark of generosity would ever think of hurting him, he lies so open to injury; but so indolent, that if he cannot overcome this habit, all his good qualities will signify nothing at all." At this time, he published an Ode on the Installation of the Duke of Newcastle, which his friend, who was a laughing spectator of the ceremony, considers "the only entertainment that had any tolerable elegance," and thinks it, "with some little abatements, uncommonly well on such an occasion:" it was, however, very inferior to that which he himself composed when the Duke of Grafton was installed.
His next production (in 1751) was Elfrida, written on the model of the ancient Greek Tragedy; a delicate exotic, not made to thrive in our "cold septentrion blasts," and which, when it was long after transferred to the theatre by Colman, was unable to endure the rough aspect of a British audience. The poet complained of some trimming and altering that had been thought requisite by the manager on the occasion; and Colman, it is said, in return, threatened him with a chorus of Grecian washerwomen. Matters were no better when Mason himself undertook to prepare it for the stage.
In 1752, we find him recommended to Lord Rockingham, by Mr. Charles Yorke, who thought him, said Warburton, likely to attach that Lord's liking to him, as he was a young nobleman of elegance, and loved painting and music. In the following year he lost his father, in the disposition of whose affairs he was less considered than he thought himself entitled to expect. What the reason for this partiality was, it would be vain to conjecture; nor have we any means of knowing whether the disappointment determined him to the choice of a profession which he made soon after (in 1754), when he entered into the church. From the following passage, in a letter of Warburton's, it appears that the step was not taken without some hesitation. "Mr. Mason has called on me. I found him yet unresolved whether he would take the living. I said, was the question about a mere secular employment, I should blame him without reserve if he refused the offer. But as I regarded going into orders in another light, I frankly owned to him he ought not to go unless he had a call; by which I meant, I told him, nothing fanatical or superstitious, but an inclination, and on that a resolution, to dedicate all his studies to the science of religion, and totally to abandon his poetry: he entirely agreed with me in thinking that decency, reputation, and religion, all required this sacrifice of him, and that if he went into orders he intended to give it." This was surely an absurd squeamishness in one of the same profession, as Warburton was, who had begun his career by translations in prose and verse from Latin writers, had then mingled in the literary cabals of the day, and afterwards did not think his time misemployed in editing and commenting on Shakspeare and Pope. Yet he was unreasonable enough to continue his expectations that Mason should do what he had, without any apparent compunction, omitted to do himself; for after speaking of Brown, the unfortunate author of Barbarossa, who was also an ecclesiastic, he adds: "How much shall I honour one, who has a stronger propensity to poetry, and has got a greater name in it, if he performs his promise to me of putting away these idle baggages after his sacred espousal." After all, this proved to be one of the vows at which Jove laughs. The sacred espousal did not lessen his devotion to the idle baggages; and it is very doubtful whether he discharged his duties as King's Chaplain or Rector of Aston (for both which appointments he was indebted to the kindness of Lord Holdernesse) at all the worse for this attachment, which he was indeed barefaced enough to avow two years after by the publication of some of his odes. At his Rectory of Aston, in Yorkshire, he continued to live for great part of his remaining life, with occasional absences in the metropolis, at Cambridge, or at York, where he was made Precentor and Canon of the Cathedral, and where his residence was therefore sometimes required. I have not learnt whether he had any other preferment. Hurd, in a letter written in 1768, mentions that the death of a Dr. Atwell threw a good living into his hands. Be this as it might, he was rich enough, and had an annual income of about fifteen hundred pounds at his death. Lord Orford says of him somewhere in his letters, that he intended to have refused a bishopric if it had been offered him. He might have spared himself the pains of coming to this resolution; for mitres, "though they fell on many a critic's head," and on that of his friend Hurd among the rest, did not seem adapted to the brows of a poet. When the death of Cibber had made the laurel vacant, he was informed that "being in orders he was thought merely on that account less eligible for the office than a layman." "A reason," said he, "so politely put, I was glad to hear assigned; and if I had thought it a weak one, they who know me will readily believe that I am the last man in the world who would have attempted to controvert it." Of the laurel, he probably was not more ambitious than of the mitre; though he was still so obstinate as to believe that he might unite the characters of a clerk and a poet, to which he would fain have superadded that of a statist also. Caractacus, another tragedy on the ancient plan, but which made a better figure on the stage, appeared in 1759; and in 1762, three elegies. In 1769, Harris heard him preach at St. James's early prayers, and give a fling at the French for the invasion of Corsica. Thus politics, added his hearer, have entered the sanctuary. The sermon is the sixth in his printed collection. A fling at the French was at all times a favourite topic with him. In the discourse delivered before George III on the Sunday preceding his Coronation, he has stretched the text a little that he may take occasion to descant on the blessings of civil liberty, and has quoted Montesquieu's opinion of the British Government. In praising our religious toleration, he is careful to justify our exception of the church of Rome from the general indulgence. Nor was it in the pulpit only that he acted the politician. He was one of those, as we are told in the Biographical Dictionary, who thought the decision of Parliament on the Middlesex election a violation of the rights of the people; and when the counties began, in 1779, to associate for parliamentary reform, he took an active part in assisting their deliberations, and wrote several patriotic manifestos. In the same year appeared his Ode to the Naval Officers of Great Britain, on the trial of Admiral Keppel, in which the poetry is strangled by the politics. His harp was in better tune, when, in 1782, an Ode to Mr. Pitt declared the hopes he had conceived of the son of Chatham; for, like many others, who espoused the cause of freedom, he had ranged himself among the partisans of the youthful statesman, who was then doing all he could to persuade others, as he had no doubt persuaded himself, that he was one of the number.
In the mean time Gray, who, if he had lived longer, might, perhaps, have restrained him from mixing in this turmoil, was no more. The office which he performed of biographer, or rather of editor, for his deceased friend, has given us one of the most delightful books in its kind that our language can boast. It is just that this acknowledgment should be made to Mason, although Mr. Mathias has recently added many others of Gray's most valuable papers, which his former editor was scarcely scholar enough to estimate as they deserved; and Mr. Mitford has shewn us, that some omissions, and perhaps some alterations, were unnecessarily made by him in the letters themselves. As to the task which the latter of these gentlemen imposed on himself, few will think that every passage which he has admitted, though there be nothing in any to detract from the real worth of Gray, could have been made public consistently with those sacred feelings of regard for his memory, by which the mind of Mason was impressed, and that reluctance which he must have had to conquer, before he resolved on the publication at all. The following extract from a letter, written by the Rev. Edward Jones, brings us into the presence of Mason, and almost to an acquaintance with his thoughts at this time, and on this occasion. "Being at York in September 1771," (Gray died on the thirtieth of July preceding), "I was introduced to Mr. Mason, then in residence. On my first visit, he was sitting in an attitude of much attention to a drawing, pinned up near the fire-place; and another gentleman, whom I afterwards found to be a Mr. Varlet, a miniature painter, who has since settled at Bath, had evidently been in conversation with him about it. My friend begged leave to askwhomit was intended to represent. Mr. Mason hesitated, and looked earnestly at Mr. Varlet. I could not resist (though I instantly felt a wish to have been silent) saying, surely from the strong likeness it must be the late Mr. Gray. Mr. Mason at once certainly forgave the intrusion, by asking my opinion as to his fears of having caricatured his poor friend. The features were certainly softened down, previously to the engraving."[1]—Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, vol. ix. p. 718.
In the next year, 1772, appeared the first book of the English Garden. The other three followed separately in 1777, 1779, and 1782. The very title of this poem was enough to induce a suspicion, that the art which it taught (if art it can be called) was not founded on general and permanent principles. It was rather a mode which the taste of the time and country had rendered prevalent, and which the love of novelty is already supplanting. In the neighbourhood of those buildings which man constructs for use or magnificence, there is no reason why he should prefer irregularity to order, or dispose his paths in curved lines, rather than in straight. Homer, when he describes the cavern of Calypso, covers it with a vine, and scatters the alder, the poplar, and the cypress, without any symmetry about it; but near the palace of Alcinous he lays out the garden by the rule and compass. Our first parents in Paradise, are placed by Milton amidst
A happy rural seat of various view;
but let the same poet represent himself in his pensive or his cheerful moods, and he is at one time walking "by hedge-row elms on hillocks green;" and at another, "in trim gardens." When we are willing to escape from the tedium of uniformity, nature and accident supply numberless varieties, which we shall for the most part vainly strive to heighten and improve. It is too much to say, that we will use the face of the country as the painter does his canvas;
Take thy plastic spade,It is thy pencil; take thy seeds, thy plants,They are thy colours.
The analogy can scarcely hold farther than in a parterre; and even there very imperfectly. Mason could not hear to see his own system pushed to that excess into which it naturally led; and bitterly resented the attempts made by the advocates of the picturesque, to introduce into his landscapes more factitious wildness than he intended.
In 1783 he published a Translation from the Latin of Du Fresnoy's Art of Painting, in which the precepts are more capable of being reduced to practice. He had undertaken the task when young, partly as an exercise in versification, and partly to fix on his mind the principles of an art in which he had himself some skill. Sir Joshua Reynolds, having desired to see it, added some notes, and induced him to revise and publish it. The artist found in it the theory of ideal beauty, which had been taught him by Zachary Mudge, from the writings of Plato, and which enabled him to rise above the mere mechanism of his predecessors. That Mason's version surpasses the original, is not saying much in its praise. In some prefatory lines addressed to Reynolds, he has described the character of Dryden with much happiness.
The last poem which he published separately, was a Secular Ode on the Revolution in 1688. It was formal and vapid; but sufficed to shew that time, though it had checked "the lyric rapture," had left him his ardour in the cause of freedom. Like the two leaders of the opposite parties, Pitt and Fox, he hailed with glad voice the dawn of French liberty. It was only for the gifted eye of Burke to foresee the storm that was impending.
At the same time he recommended the cause of the enslaved Negroes from the pulpit. The abolition of the slave trade was one of the few political subjects, the introduction of which seemed to be allowable in that place. In 1788, appeared also his Memoirs of William Whitehead, attached to the posthumous works of that writer; a piece of biography, as little to be compared in interest to the former, as Whitehead himself can be compared to Gray.
His old age glided on in solitude and peace amid his favourite pursuits, at his rectory of Aston, where he had taught his two acres of garden to command the inequalities of "hill and dale," and to combine "use with beauty." The sonnet in which he dedicated his poems to his patron, the Earl of Holdernesse, describes in his best manner the happiness he enjoyed in this retreat. He was not long permitted to add to his other pleasures the comforts of a connubial life. In 1765 he had married Mary, daughter of William Shermon, Esq., of Kingston-upon-Hull, who in two years left him a widower. Her epitaph is one of those little poems to which we can always return with a melancholy pleasure. I have heard that this lady had so little regard for the art in which her husband excelled, that on his presenting her with a copy of verses, after the wedding was over, she crumpled them up and put them into her pocket unread. When he had entered his seventieth year, Hurd, who had been his first friend, and the faithful monitor of his studies from youth, confined him "to a sonnet once a year, or so;" warning him, that "age, like infancy, should forbear to play with pointed tools." He had more latitude allowed in prose; for in 1795 he published Essays, Historical and Critical, on English Church Music. In the former part of his subject, he is said, by those who have the best means of knowing, to be well informed and accurate; but in the latter to err on the side of a dry simplicity, which, in the present refined state of the art, it would not answer any good purpose to introduce into the music of our churches. In speaking of a wind instrument, which William of Malmsbury seems to describe as being acted on by the vapour arising from hot water, he has unfortunately gone out of his way to ridicule the projected invention of the steam-boat by Lord Stanhope. The atrocities committed during the fury of the French Revolution had so entirely cured him of his predilection for the popular part of our Government, that he could not resist the opportunity, however ill-timed, of casting a slur on this nobleman, who was accused of being over-partial to it. In the third Essay, on Parochial Psalmody, he gives the preference to Merrick's weak and affected version over the two other translations that are used in our churches. The late Bishop Horsley, in his Commentary on the Psalms, was, I believe, the first who was hardy enough to claim that palm for Sternhold, to which, with all its awkwardness, his rude vigour entitles him.
When he comes to speak ofChristianizingour hymns, the apprehension which he expresses of deviating from the present practice of our establishment, seems to have restrained him from saying something which he would otherwise have said. The question surely is not so much, what the practice of our present establishment is, as what that of the first Christians was. There is, perhaps, no alteration in our service that could be made with better effect than this, provided it were made with as great caution as its importance demands.
His death, which was at last sudden, was caused by a hurt on his shin, that happened when he was stepping out of his carriage. On the Sunday (two days after) he felt so little inconvenience from the accident, as to officiate in his church at Aston. But on the next Wednesday, the 7th of April, 1797, a rapid mortification brought him to his grave. His monument, of which Bacon was the sculptor, is placed in Westminster Abbey, near that of Gray, with the following inscription:—
Optimo ViroGulielmo Mason, A.M.Poetae,Si quis aliusCulto, Casto, PioSacrum.Ob. 7. Apr. 1797.Aet. 72.
Mason is reported to have been ugly in his person. His portrait by Reynolds gives to features, ill-formed and gross, an expression of intelligence and benignity. In the latter part of life, his character appears to have undergone a greater change, from its primitive openness and good nature, than mere time and experience of the world should have wrought in it. Perhaps this was nothing more than a slight perversion which he had contracted in the school of Warburton. What was a coarse arrogance in the master himself, assumed the form of nicety and superciliousness in the less confident and better regulated tempers of Mason and Hurd. His harmless vanity cleaved to him longer. As a proof of this, it is related that, several years after the publication of Isis, when he was travelling through Oxford, and happened to pass over Magdalen Bridge at a late hour of the evening, he turned round to a friend who was riding with him, and remarked that it was luckily grown dusk, for they should enter the University unobserved. When his friend, with some surprise inquired into the reason of this caution: What, (said he) do you not remember my Isis?
He was very sensible to the annoyance of the periodical critics, which Gray was too philosophical or too proud to regard otherwise than as matter of amusement. He was the butt for a long line of satirists or lampooners. Churchill, Lloyd, Colman, the author of the Probationary Odes, and, if I remember right, Paul Whitehead and Wolcot, all levelled their shafts at him in turn. In the Probationary Odes, his peculiarities were well caught: when the writer of these pages repeated some of the lines in which he was imitated to Anna Seward, whose admiration of Mason is recorded in her letters, she observed, that what was meant for a burlesque was in itself excellent. There is reason to suppose that he sometimes indulged himself in the same license under which he suffered from others. If he was indeed the author of the Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers, and of some other anonymous satires which have been imputed to him, he must have felt Hayley's intended compliment as a severe reproach:
Sublimer Mason! not to thee belongThe reptile beauties of invenom'd song.
Of the Epistle, when it was remarked, in the hearing of Thomas Warton, that it had more energy than could have been expected from Walpole, to whom others ascribed it, Warton remarked that it might have been written by Walpole, and buckramed by Mason. Indeed, it is not unlikely that one supplied the venom, and the other spotted the snake. In a letter of expostulation to Warton, Mason did not go the length of disclaiming the satire, though he was angry enough that it should be laid at his door. I have heard that he received with much apathy the praises offered him by Hayley, in the Essay on Epic Poetry. He has remarked, "that if rhyme does not condense the sense, which passes through its vehicle, it ceases to be good, either as verse or rhyme."[2] This rule is laid down too broadly. His own practice was not always consonant with it, as Hayley's never was. With Darwin's poetry, it is said that he was much pleased.
His way of composing, as we learn from Gray's remarks upon his poems, was to cast down his first thoughts carelessly, and at large, and then clip them here and there at leisure. "This method," as his friend observed, "will leave behind it a laxity, a diffuseness. The force of a thought (otherwise well-invented, well-turned, and well-placed) is often weakened by it." He might have added, that it is apt to give to poetry the air of declamation.
Mason wished to join what he considered the correctness of Pope with the high imaginative power of Milton, and the lavish colouring of Spenser. In the attempt to unite qualities so heterogeneous, the effect of each is in a great measure lost, and little better than a caput mortuum remains. With all his praises of simplicity, he is generally much afraid of saying any thing in a plain and natural manner. He often expresses the commonest thoughts in a studied periphrasis. He is like a man, who being admitted into better company than his birth and education have fitted him for, is under continual apprehension, lest his attitude and motions should betray his origin. Even his negligence is studied. His muse resembles the Prioresse in Chaucer,
That pained her to counterfete chere,Of court and be stateliche of manere,And to been holden digne of reverence.
Yet there were happier moments in which he delivered himself up to the ruling inspiration. So it was when he composed the choruses in the Caractacus, beginning,
Mona on Snowdon calls—Hail, thou harp of Phrygian frame—
and
Hark! heard ye not yon footstep dread—
of which it is scarcely too much to say that in some parts they remind us of the ancient tragedians.
In each of his two Tragedies, the incidents are conducted with so much skill, and there is so much power of moving the affections, that one is tempted to wish he had pursued this line, though he perhaps would never have done any thing much better in it. One great fault is, that the dramatis personae are too much employed in pointing out the Claudes and Salvator Rosas, with which they are surrounded. They seem to want nothing but long poles in their hands to make them very good conductors over a gallery of pictures. When Earl Orgar, on seeing the habitation of his daughter, begins—
How nobly does this venerable wood,Gilt with the glories of the orient sun,Embosom yon fair mansion! The soft airSalutes me with most cool and temperate breathAnd, as I tread, the flower-besprinkled lawnSends up a cloud of fragance—
and Aulus Didius opens the other play with a description somewhat more appropriate:
This is the secret centre of the isle:Here, Romans, pause, and let the eye of wonderGaze on the solemn scene; behold yon oak,How stern he frowns, and with his broad brown armsChills the pale plain beneath him: mark yon altar,The dark stream brawling round its rugged base,These cliffs, these yawning caverns, this wide circus,Skirted with unhewn stone: they awe my soul,As if the very genius of the placeHimself appear'd, and with terrific treadStalk'd through his drear domain—
we could fancy that both these personages had come fresh from the study of the English garden. The distresses of Elfrida, and the heroism of Caractacus, are in danger of becoming objects of secondary consideration, while we are admiring the shades of Harewood, and the rocks of Mona. He has attempted to shelter himself under the authority of Sophocles; but though there are some exquisite touches of landscape painting in that drama, the poet has introduced them with a much more sparing hand. It is said that Hurd pruned away a great deal more luxuriance of this kind, with which the first draught of the Elfrida was overrun; and we learn from Gray, in his admirable letter of criticism on the Caractacus, that the opening of that tragedy was, as it at first stood, even much more objectionable than at present. Such descriptions are better suited to the Masque, a species of drama founded on some wild and romantic adventure, and of which the interest does not depend on the manners or the passions. It is therefore more in its place in Argentile and Curan, which he calls a legendary drama, written on the old English model. He composed it after the other two, and during the short time that his wife lived; but, like several of his poems, it was not published till the year of his decease. The beginning promises well: and the language of our old writers is at first tolerably well imitated. There is afterwards too much trick and too many prettinesses; such is that of the nosegay which the princess finds, and concludes from its tasteful arrangement to be the work of princely fingers. The subordinate parts, of the Falconer, and Ralph, his deputy, are not sustained according to the author's first conception of them. The story is well put together. He has, perhaps, nothing else that is equal in expression to the following passage.
Thou know'st, when we did quit our anchor'd barks,We cross'd a pleasant valley; rather sayA nest of sister vales, o'erhung with hillsOf varied form and foliage; every valeHad its own proper brook, the which it hugg'dIn its green breast, as if it fear'd to loseThe treasur'd crystal. You might mark the courseOf these cool rills more by the ear than eye,For, though they oft would to the sun unfoldTheir silver as they past, 'twas quickly lost;But ever did they murmur. On the vergeOf one of these clear streams, there stood a cellO'ergrown with moss and ivy; near to which,On a fall'n trunk, that bridged the little brookA hermit sat. Of him we ask'd the nameOf this sweet valley, and he call'd it Hakeness.
(Argentile and Curan, A, 1.)
In two lines more, we are unluckily reminded that this is no living landscape.
Thither, my Sewold, go, or pitch thy tentNear to thy ships, for they are near thescene.
Since the time of Mason, this rage for describing what is called scenery (and scenery indeed it often is, having little of nature in it) has infected many of our play-writers and novelists.
Argentile's intention of raising a rustic monument to the memory of his father, is taken from Shakspeare.
This grove my sighs shall consecrate; in shapeOf some fair tomb, here will I heap the turfAnd call it Adelbright's. Yon aged yew,Whose rifted trunk, rough bark, and gnarled rootsGive solemn proof of its high ancientry,Shall canopy the shrine. There's not a flower,That hangs the dewy head, and seems to weep,As pallid blue-bells, crow-tyes and marsh lilies,But I'll plant here, and if they chance to wither,My tears shall water them; there's not a birdThat trails a sad soft note, as ringdoves do,Or twitters painfully like the dun martlet,But I will lure by my best art, to roostAnd plain them in these branches. Larks and finchesWill I fright hence, nor aught shall dare approachThis pensive spot, save solitary thingsThat love to mourn as I do.
How cold and lifeless are these pretty lines, when compared to the "wench-like words," of the young princes, which suggested them.
If he be gone he'll make his grave a bedWith female fairies will his tomb be haunted,And worms will not come to thee.
Arv. With fairest flow'rs,Whilst summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele,I'll sweeten thy sad grave. Thou shalt not lackThe flower that's like thy face, pale primrose; norThe azured hare-bell, like thy veins; no, norThe leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander,Out-sweeten'd not thy breath: the ruddock wouldWith charitable bill (O bill, fore-shamingThe rich-left heirs, that let their fathers lieWithout a monument!) bring thee all this;Yea, and furr'd moss besides, when flowers are none,To winter-ground thy corse.
This is grief, seeking to relieve and forget itself in fiction and fancy; the other, though the occasion required an expression of deeper sorrow, is a mere pomp of feeling.
His blank verse in the English Garden has not the majesty of Akenside, the sweetness of Dyer, or the terseness of Armstrong. Its characteristic is delicacy; but it is a delicacy approaching nearer to weakness than to grace. It has more resemblance to the rill that trickles over its fretted channel, than to the stream that winds with a full tide, and "warbles as it flows." The practice of cutting it into dialogue had perhaps crippled him. As he has made the characters in his plays too attentive to the decorations of the scene-painter, so in the last book of the English Garden he has turned his landscape into a theatre, for the representation of a play. The story of Nerina is too long and too complicated for an episode in a didactic poem. He will seldom bear to be confronted with those writers whom he is found either by accident or design to resemble. His picture of the callow young in a bird's-nest is, I think, with some alteration, copied from Statius.
—Her young meanwhileCallow and cold, from their moss-woven nestPeep forth; they stretch their little eager throatsBroad to the wind, and plead to the lone sprayTheir famish'd plaint importunately shrill.
(English Garden, b. 3.)
—Volucrum sic turba recentum,Cum reducem longo prospexit in aethere matrem,Ire cupit contra, summaque e margine nidiExtat hians; jam jamque cadat ni pectore totoObstet aperta parens et amantibus increpet alis.
(Theb.lib. x. 458.)
Oppian's imitation of this is happier.
[Greek: Os dhopot aptaenessi pherei bosin dortalichoisiMaetaer, eiarinae Zephurou protangelos ornis,Oi dapalon truzontes epithroskousi kaliae,Gaethusunoi peri maetri, kai imeirontes edodaesXeilos anaptussousin apan depi doma lelaekenAndros xeinodochoio liga klazousi neossois.]